From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Mon Oct 11 2004 - 12:46:34 CST
In some countries when a person tells you their age it will be one year
greater than the way we count in Europe & North America. In these
countries as soon as a baby is born it is called "one year old" (i.e. in
it's first year), and after a year it is two.
This is complicated further in Tibet where they count the years of a
person's life from the last New Year rather than their birth date.
There, if a baby is born two days before their new year's day it will be
called two years old when it is only three days old since it is in it's
second colander year.
Our way of counting seems as illogical to them as theirs does to us.
Just shows you shouldn't take numbering systems for granted.
- Chris
Hohberger, Clive wrote:
> Mike,
> I agree with you... almost.. I think that AD and BC are really ordinal numbers, which denote relative position in a series from a 1-origin point. I thought "1 AD" really stands for "primo anno domine" (pardon my forgotten Latin) or "first year of our lord".
>
> Cardinal numbers denote quantity, and may be negative or zero as well as positive.
> Clive
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